Seagate NAS HDD product reviews

Getting a 2TB drive for under $200 is pretty common, yet this drive is particularly good value in my opinion. Why? Because it has been specifically designed to take a hammering and keep chugging on. Being in a regular PC, hard drives can expect to have some down-time... either idling overnight, or better yet, being fully powered down for a few hours. In a NAS system, drives are often spun up and stay spinning... 24 hours a day... 7 days a week... all year round. On top of that, NAS systems are increasingly cloud-connected, meaning that while *you* might not be using it, someone else may be, especially if it's on a corporate or gaming network.

Being the 'smallest' unit in the line, the 2TB drives are naturally the cheapest. With a 4TB unit sitting at the top end, there's a lot of space inside one of these babies! They ought to come in a blue box. With NAS chassis' now carrying up to 5 bays, there's the potential for 20TB of storage sitting on your home or business network, configured in a variety of ways with varying levels of data redundancy. The very thought of 20TB of space on a home network is as terrifying as it is appealing to me... while I'd love to have that much freedom, but I doubt I would fill it with anything worthwhile!

For the first few days of trialling these drives, I put them through some pretty hard testing - continuous and often simultaneous read/write cycles, an array of thousands of small files, mixed file sizes, single files up to 400GB - nothing seemed to phase them. Heck, they didn't even get particularly hot, though that may have something to do with the fan placement in the NAS chassis I was using. The real test is going to be if they are still chugging along safely after a full year or two of non-stop spinning. I'm not gentle or subtle about my storage, the closest I come to data management is trying not to write more than a single stream of data at a time, and even then that's more a vague attempt to minimise file fragmentation. So, yes, these drives will experience a rough life... the 5yr limited warranty for Australia and New Zealand is somewhat reassuring though. A dead drive won't get my data back, but at least there's a chance I'll get a replacement unit out of it.

Overall, would I use these drives in a desktop rig? Probably not, though I think they would handle it just fine, it's a bit like swatting flies with a hydraulic post-rammer. I think they would be the very thing in a high-end gaming rig though, maybe something from Alienware, but a 'regular Joe' rig would have no need of this level of engineering IMHO. Still, if you value reliability then this would be a smart option for you to consider. However, if you are planning to add a good quality NAS to your home network, these definitely *are* the drives you're looking for. Yes, these are the drives you're looking for.... *waves hands mysteriously*